Pontano Chapel, Naples, exterior, 1490–92. Photograph: Miguel Hermoso Cuesta. Credit: Wikimedia Commons. Reading the inscriptions For convenience, the discussion follows the tablets from the façade along Via dei Tribunali and then around onto the side facing Piazzetta Pietrasanta, beside the campanile of Santa Maria Maggiore alla Pietrasanta. This corresponds to one natural route of approachContinue reading “Hidden in Plain Sight V. The Pontano Chapel: The Counsel of Stone — The Twelve Exterior Inscriptions”
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Hidden in Plain Sight IV. The Pontano Chapel: The Authority of Inscription — Pontano and Renaissance Epigraphy
Theodor de Bry, Portrait of Giovanni Gioviano Pontano, c. 1597–99, engraving from Jean-Jacques Boissard, Icones virorum illustrium. Image credit: Rijksmuseum. The inscriptions of the Pontano Chapel cannot be understood fully from their words alone. To a Renaissance humanist, epigraphy carried associations with the recovery of antiquity, philological scholarship, education, social and intellectual distinction, and theContinue reading “Hidden in Plain Sight IV. The Pontano Chapel: The Authority of Inscription — Pontano and Renaissance Epigraphy”
Hidden in Plain Sight I: The Pontano Chapel. Architecture, Rhetoric and Memory
The Pontano Chapel stands on the Via dei Tribunali, one of the busiest and most historically dense streets in Naples. It is not hidden, yet it is remarkably easy to pass without understanding what it is. Its grey piperno exterior is austere, its Latin inscriptions are inaccessible to many viewers, and the intellectual culture thatContinue reading “Hidden in Plain Sight I: The Pontano Chapel. Architecture, Rhetoric and Memory”
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